DSS systems are primarily used for security and loss prevention, and they are increasingly being deployed in market segments with more diverse usage models. In retail environments DSS systems are used for business intelligence to improve sales or anonymously analyze purchasing behavior. In transportation DSS systems provide license plate recognition to track traffic violations, and in the government sector DSS devices monitor public areas, such as airport terminals.

Although DSS use cases vary, a common factor across all market segments is the availability of video streams. In this computing environment, one of the most important parameters for DSS platform evaluation is media encode and media decode capability, and processor utilization is one of the key enablers of such capabilities in a DSS device. Understanding available processor utilization is critical to ensure that other applications, or video analytics algorithms, can be executed by the processor.